Caroline Edmonds - Research Fellow

PhD studentship opportunity

The School of Psychology at UEL will be offering a University Studentship for a full-time MPhil/PhD student commencing in February 2010. The studentship will cover fees and a bursary of £12,000 per annum. This is a competitive scheme with a number of projects. My project is entitlted, “Does having a drink help you think? The effect of water consumption on cognition and mood in adults.”

You can find more details about the application process here. This studentship is only open to home students.

While there are studies that suggest that dehydration negatively affects cognition in adults1-2, not only are the results of these studies inconclusive, but they confound the effects of dehydration with the methods by which it is induced (heat stress, fluid restriction and or exercise3. A related question is whether drinking water can aid cognition under normal conditions (i.e. no or mild dehydration).

There is a developing area of research on the positive effects of water consumption on cognition in children4-7, suggesting that having a drink of water positively affects performance on tasks employing visual attention and visual memory. However, there is very little research examining the effects of water consumption on cognitive performance in non-dehydrated adults. The research that has been conducted suggests that water consumption positively impacts on subjective ratings of alertness8. It also improves cognitive performance in the case of individuals who were thirsty before they had a drink8.

The research question that will be addressed by this PhD is: what are the effects of water consumption on cognition and mood in adults?

By negotiation with the supervision team, this could take a number of different directions. It could, for example, examine what specific cognitive processes are affected by water consumption. Alternatively, it could describe and quantify the water consumption effect, for example, by evaluating the amount of water drunk, the length of interval between water consumption and improvements in performance and/or the duration of the effect. It could also explore how initial thirst interacts with water consumption to affect cognition.

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